Pros and cons of installing multiple Ghost sites on one Digital Ocean droplet

Please bear with me because I’m a beginner.

I’m currently running one site which I’ve installed using Digital Ocean’s one-click app, on the smallest droplet ($5/month).

I’ve seen some mentions of installing multiple Ghost sites on a single droplet.

My preference is to use a single droplet for each website I build, for the sake of simplicity, unless it’s quite simple and for some other reason preferable to put, say, ten different sites on a single droplet (I do plan to build quite a few).

On a related note, how many visitors could I expect to have on my site at one time (the one currently on a $5/month droplet) before it crashed or slowed to a halt?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

I currently run several Ghost blogs and several WordPress sites on the same t2.small in AWS so it’s definitely doable if you do not have sites with thousands of daily users. Overall there is no issue running several sites on the same droplet, it makes managing them slightly easier (1 server instead of many), but can be automated with the likes of ansible or other devops tools.

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Thanks @dsecareanu. At the moment I have a few blogs installed on separate Digital Ocean droplets. Would it be difficult to move them all onto one droplet sometime in the future? And is there a good way of estimating what size droplet I would need based on expected traffic?

If they are Ghost blogs, it shouldn’t be hard. Just export and then import into newly setup blog.
https://docs.ghost.org/faq/the-importer/

If some other tech, then just copy files and dump database and move them over to new server.

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Just use docker containers :slight_smile:

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I was able to easily survive a peak of about 100k page loads in a day, with a max of around 1500 “live visitors” reported by google analytics at some point, on a $5 Vultr droplet - similar to Digital Ocean’s.
It was wordpress running under nginx and php 7.0, with cloudflare in front - from ghost you should expect similar or better performance if everything else is done properly.

I’m only hosting a single Ghost blog on mine but I can’t see why it wouldn’t work - just make sure you configure each instance on its own port and proxy it with Nginx / Apache accordingly.

You might want to look into something like CloudFlare too, to reduce the overhead on the Droplet. The free tier allows you to protect and cache a single site, so perhaps use that with the blog receiving most traffic. Paid plans give you more options and sites of course.

Just spotted this thread which may be of use too:

I too would like to do this, but I am not sure at all where to begin. I’ve got my blog up and running on one droplet in Digital Ocean (I used the one click install). Now what?

This can be a good starting point:

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I’m also hosting two Ghost blogs on a small DO droplet and this is totally fine. Sure, there’s not a lot of traffic but it’s enough. However my droplet is running with RancherOS and all my websites are docker container so it’s very easy to manage… Even with Let’s Encrypt :slightly_smiling_face:

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